The Runner

by Peter May

  Wen frowned. ‘No possible. You too big.’

  For a moment Margaret was perplexed, and then the light dawned. ‘No, not one month pregnant. One month to go.’

  Wen clearly did not understand, and Li explained. Then she smiled. ‘Me, too. Another four week.’

  Margaret smiled and nodded and wished she were somewhere else. ‘What a coincidence,’ she said, wondering how many pregnant women in a country of 1.2 billion people might be entering the last four weeks of their confinement.

  Wen reached out across the table and put her hand over Margaret’s. ‘Girl? Boy?’ And Margaret immediately felt guilty for being so superior.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  Wen’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment. The ultrasound technology was easy. How could anyone not want to know? ‘I got boy,’ she said proudly.

  ‘Good for you.’ Margaret’s cheeks were aching from her fixed smile. She turned it on Li, and he immediately saw it for the grimace it really was.

  He said hastily to Wen in Chinese, ‘Have you enrolled for your antenatal classes here yet?’

  She shook her head, and glanced at Sun. ‘No, I’ve been too busy unpacking.’

  Sun grinned. ‘I told you, we could open a shop with the amount of gear she’s brought with her, Chief.’

  Two beers and two glasses of water arrived at the table.

  Li said to Wen in English, ‘Maybe Margaret could take you to her antenatal class this afternoon.’ He looked pointedly at Margaret. ‘And you could get her enrolled.’

  ‘Sure,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s three classes a week, and a couple of extras I go to as well.’ Once she got her there, she knew she could dump responsibility on to Jon Macken’s wife, Yixuan, who could deal with her in Chinese. ‘They encourage husbands to go, too.’ And she returned Li’s pointed look, the smile bringing an ache now to her jaw. ‘Only, some of them never seem to have the time.’ She turned to Sun. ‘But you’ll want to go, Detective Sun, won’t you?’

  Sun looked a little bemused. He came from a world where men and women led separate lives. He looked to Li for guidance. Li said, ‘Sure he will. But not this afternoon. He’s going to be too busy.’

  ‘And I suppose that applies to his boss, too,’ Margaret said.

  ‘I’m picking up my father at the station. Remember?’ Li said, and suddenly reality came flooding back. For two days Margaret had been able to return to her former self, focused on her work, on the minutest observation of medical evidence, a fulfilment of all her training and experience. And suddenly she was back in the role of expectant mother and bride-to-be. Li’s father arrived today, her mother tomorrow. The betrothal meeting was the day after. The wedding next week. She groaned inwardly and felt as if her life were slipping back on to its course beyond her control.

  The food arrived. Fried aubergine dumplings, mashed aubergine with sesame paste, sliced beef and tofu. And they picked at the dishes in the centre of the table with their chopsticks, lifting what they fancied on to their own plates to wash down with beer or water.

  ‘I thought this was a noodle restaurant,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Patience,’ Li said. ‘All will be revealed.’ And they ate in silence for several minutes, turning their heads towards the door each time a new group of guests arrived, and the chorus started all over again. The restaurant was beginning to fill up now.

  Then Wen said to Margaret, ‘You must have big apartment, Maggee, married to senior officer.’

  Margaret shook her head. ‘We’re not married. Yet.’ Wen was shocked, and Margaret realised that it was not something Sun had discussed with her. ‘But we get married next week,’ she added for clarification. ‘And, yes, we will have a big apartment. I hope.’

  Li was aware of Sun glancing in his direction, but he kept his eyes fixed on his food as he ate. And then the noodles arrived. Four steaming bowls on a tray, each one surrounded by six small dishes containing beanpaste sauce, cucumber, coriander, chopped radish, chickpeas and spring onions. Four waiters surrounded the holder of the tray, and called out the name of each dish as it was emptied over the noodles.

  ‘This is one hell of a noisy restaurant,’ Margaret said as she mixed her noodles with their added ingredients. She lifted the bowl and slurped some up with her chopsticks, adept now at the Chinese way of eating. ‘But the food’s damn good.’

  When they finished eating, Li said to Margaret, ‘Why don’t you and Wen get a taxi up to the hospital. I’ll take your bike in the back of the Jeep, and you can get a taxi home.’

  ‘Will I ever see it again?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll bring it back tonight.’

  ‘What about your father.’

  Li smiled. ‘He goes to bed early.’ He paused. ‘And your mother arrives tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ she said. But she had not missed his point. It would be their last chance to be alone together before the wedding.

  Li asked for the check, and Wen and Margaret went to the ladies’ room. Sun sat silently for a moment or two. Then he looked at Li. ‘Chief?’ Li glanced up from his purse. ‘She doesn’t know, does she?’

  And all the light went out of Li’s eyes. He supposed it was probably a common topic of conversation in the detectives’ room. But nobody had ever raised it with him directly before. ‘No,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want her to.’

  V

  The crowded sidewalk was lined with winter-naked trees. Pedestrians wrapped in fleeces and quilted jackets stepped between them, in and out of the cycle lane, dodging bicycles and one another. A kind of semi-ordered chaos. On the street, motorists behaved as if they were still on foot, or on bicycles. Four lanes became six. Horns peeped and blared as vehicles switched non-existent lanes and inched through the afternoon gridlock. The voice of a bus conductress cut across the noise, insistent, hectoring, a constant accompaniment to the roar of the traffic.

  The taxi had dropped Margaret and Wen on the corner, and they had to make their way back along Xianmen Dajie, Tweedledum and Tweedledee waddling side by side through the crowds, breath clouding in the freezing temperatures. To Margaret’s surprise and bemusement, Wen had taken her hand. She felt as if she had stepped into a time-warp, a little girl again, walking to school hand in hand with her best friend. Except that she was in her thirties, this was Beijing, and she hardly knew the girl whose hand she was holding. Still, even if there was an awkwardness about it, there was also a comfort in it. And Wen was quite unselfconscious. She was babbling away in her broken English.

  ‘Is verr exciting be in Beijing. I always dream be here. Everything so bi-ig.’ She grinned. ‘I really like. You like?’

  ‘Sure,’ Margaret said. Although she might not have admitted it, Beijing was probably as close to being home as anywhere she had ever lived.

  ‘Chief Li, he verr nice man. You verr lucky.’

  Margaret’s smile was genuine. ‘I think so.’

  Wen’s face clouded a little. ‘Verr lucky,’ she repeated, almost as if to herself. Then she brightened again. ‘You can have more than one baby, yes?’

  ‘I guess,’ Margaret said. ‘If I wanted to. But I think one’s probably more than enough.’

  ‘You verr lucky. I can only have one baby. One Child Policy.’

  Margaret nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Maybe we can trade, yes? You have one baby for me, I have many baby for you.’ She grinned mischievously, and Margaret realised that maybe there was more to Wen than met the eye. Language was such a barrier. Without a grasp of its nuances and subtleties, it was nearly impossible to communicate your real self, or to fully grasp the true character and personality of others. And she wondered how she would ever have formed a relationship with Li if his English had not been as wonderfully good as it was. Even then, she had sometimes suspected, there were parts of each other they would never truly get to know.

  As they passed the entrance of the two-storey administrative block of the First Teaching Hospital of
Beijing Medical University, with its marble pillars and glass doors, a girl came down the steps towards them from where she had clearly been waiting for some time. Her gloved hands were tucked up under her arms to keep them warm, her eyes watering and her nose bright red. As she stepped in front of them to halt their progress, she stamped her feet to encourage the circulation.

  Initially, Margaret had thought there was something familiar about the girl. But with the woolly hat pulled down over her forehead and the scarf around her neck there was not much of her to go on. It wasn’t until she turned to glance behind her that Margaret saw the purple birthmark on her left cheek. ‘Lili,’ she said, the name coming back to her. Behind the tears of cold she saw quite clearly that there was fear in the girl’s eyes.

  ‘I told you, I need to talk to you, lady.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be running today?’

  ‘I already run in heats. First place. I get inside lane in final tomorrow.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ Margaret frowned. ‘How did you know to find me here?’

  Lili almost smiled and lowered her eyes towards Margaret’s bump. ‘I phone hospital to ask times of classes for antenatal.’

  ‘And how did you know it was this hospital?’

  ‘Best maternity hospital in Beijing for foreigner. I take chance. I need to talk.’

  Margaret glanced at her watch, intrigued. ‘I can give you a few minutes.’

  ‘No.’ The girl looked around suddenly, as if she thought someone might be watching. ‘Not here. I come to your home. You give me address.’

  For the first time, Margaret became wary. ‘Not if you won’t tell me what it is you want to talk to me about.’

  ‘Please, lady. I can’t say.’ She glanced at Wen who was looking at her wide-eyed. ‘Please, lady, please. You give me address.’

  There was such pleading in her eyes that Margaret, although reluctant, could not resist. ‘Hold on,’ she said, and she fumbled in her purse for a dog-eared business card. It had her home address and number, as well as a note of a friend’s number she had scribbled on it when she could find nothing else to write on. She crossed it through. ‘Here.’ She held it out and the girl took it, holding each corner between thumb and forefinger. ‘When will you come?’

  ‘I don’t know. Tonight, maybe. You be in?’

  ‘I’m in most nights.’

  Lili tucked the card carefully in her pocket and wiped her watering eyes. ‘Thank you, lady. Thank you,’ she said. And she made a tiny bow and then pushed past them, disappearing quickly into the crowd.

  Wen turned excitedly to Margaret. ‘You know who that is? That Dai Lili. She verr famous Chinese runner.’

  VI

  Li sat on the wall outside the subway, watching crowds of travellers streaming out on to the concourse from the arrivals gate at Beijing Railway Station. Away to his left a giant television screen ran ads for everything from chocolate bars to washing machines. The invasive voice of a female announcer barked out departure and arrival times with the soporific sensitivity of a computer voice announcing imminent nuclear holocaust. No one was listening.

  Li had butterflies in his stomach and his mouth was dry. He felt like a schoolboy waiting in the office of the head teacher, summoned to receive his punishment for some perceived misdemeanour. He had not set eyes on his father for nearly five years, a state of affairs for which, he knew, his father blamed him. Not without cause. For in all the years since Li had left his home in Sichuan Province to attend the University of Public Security in Beijing, he had returned on only a handful of occasions. And although he had been too young to be an active participant in the Cultural Revolution, Li felt that his father blamed him, somehow, for the death of his mother during that time of madness. A time which had also left his father in some way diminished. A lesser man than he had been. Robbed of hope and ambition. And love.

  They had not spoken once since their brief encounter at the funeral of Li’s Uncle Yifu, his father’s brother. It had been a painful, sterile affair at a city crematorium, attended mostly by fellow police officers who had served under Yifu during his years as one of Beijing’s top cops, or alongside him in the early days. Old friends had travelled all the way from Tibet, where Yifu had been sent by the Communists in the fifties when they had decided that this particular intellectual would be less of a danger to them serving as a police officer a long way from the Capital. They need not have worried, for Yifu’s only desire had been to build a better and fairer China for its people. The same people who later abused him and threw him in prison for three years during the Cultural Revolution. An experience from which he had drawn only strength, where a lesser man might have been broken. Like his brother, Li’s father.

  Li saw his father emerging from the gates, dragging a small suitcase on wheels behind him. He was a sad, shuffling figure in a long, shabby duffel coat that hung open to reveal a baggy woollen jumper with a hole in it over a blue shirt, frayed at the collar. A striped cream and red scarf hung loosely around his neck, and trousers that appeared to be a couple of sizes too big for him gathered in folds around shoes that looked more like slippers. He wore a fur, fez-like hat pulled down over thinning grey hair. Li felt immediately ashamed. He looked like one of the beggars who haunted the streets around the foreign residents’ compounds in embassy-land. And yet there was no need for it. He had an adequate pension from the university where he had lectured most of his adult life. He was well cared for in a home for senior citizens, and Li sent money every month.

  Li made his way through the crowds to greet him with a heart like lead. When he got close up, his father seemed very small, as if he had shrunk, and Li had a sudden impulse to hug him. But it was an impulse he restrained, holding out his hand instead. His father looked at him with small black eyes that shone behind wisps of hair like fuse wire sprouting from the edge of sloping brows, and for a moment Li thought he would not shake his hand. Then a small, claw-like hand emerged from the sleeve of the duffel, spattered with the brown spots of age, and disappeared inside Li’s. It was cold, and the skin felt like crêpe that might rip if you handled it too roughly.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ Li said.

  His father did not smile. ‘Well, are you going to take my case?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Li took the handle from him.

  ‘You are a big man now, Li Yan,’ his father said.

  ‘I don’t think I have grown since the last time you saw me.’ He steered the old man towards the taxi rank where he had parked his Jeep, a police light still flashing on the roof.

  ‘I mean, you are a big man in your job. Your sister told me. A Section Chief. You are young for such a position.’

  ‘I remember once,’ Li said, ‘you told me that I should only ever be what I can, and never try to be what I cannot.’

  His father said, ‘The superior person fulfils his purpose and does not boast of his achievements.’

  ‘I wasn’t boasting, father,’ Li said, stung.

  ‘He who stands on the tips of his toes cannot be steady.’

  Li sighed. There was no point in exchanging barbs of received Chinese wisdom with his father. The old man had probably forgotten more than Li ever knew. And yet the wisdom he imparted was always negative, unlike his brother, Yifu, who had only ever been positive.

  Li put the case in the back of the Jeep and opened the passenger door to help his father in. But the old man pushed away his hand. ‘I don’t need your help,’ he said. ‘I have lived sixty-seven years without any help from you.’ And he hauled himself with difficulty up into the passenger seat. Li banged the door shut and took a deep breath. He had known it would be difficult, but not this hard. A depression fell over him like fog.

  They drove in silence from the station to Zhengyi Road. Li turned right and made a U-turn opposite the gates of the Beijing Municipal Government, crossing the island of park-land that split the road in two, and driving down past the Cuan Fu Shanghai restaurant where he and his father would probably take most of th
eir meals. The armed guard at the back entrance to the Ministry of State and Public Security glanced in the window, saw Li, and waved them through.

  Li pulled up outside his apartment block on their right, and he and his father rode up in the elevator together to the fourth floor. Still they had not spoken since getting into the Jeep.

  The apartment was small. One bedroom, a living room, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and a long, narrow hallway. Li would have to sleep on the settee while his father was there. He had borrowed blankets and extra pillows. He showed the old man to his room and left him there to unpack. He went to the refrigerator and took out a cold beer, popped the cap and moved through to the living room which opened on to a large, glassed terrace with views out over the tree-lined street below, and beyond the Ministry compound to the Supreme Court and the headquarters of the Beijing Municipal Police. He drained nearly half the bottle in one, long pull. He was not sure why his father had come for the wedding. Of course, it had been necessary to invite him, but such was the state of their relationship he had been surprised when the old man had written to say he would be there. Now he wished he had just stayed away.

  Li turned at the sound of the door opening behind him. Divested of his coat and hat, his father seemed even smaller. His hair was very thin, wisps of it swept back over his shiny, speckled skull. He looked at the bottle in his son’s hand. ‘Are you not going to offer me a drink? I have come a long way.’

  ‘Of course,’ Li said. ‘I’ll show you where I keep the beer. You can help yourself any time.’ He got another bottle from the refrigerator and opened it for his father, pouring the contents into a long glass.

  They went back through to the living room, their awkwardness like a third presence. They sat down and drank in further silence until finally the old man said, ‘So when do I get to meet her?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow. At the betrothal meeting.’

  ‘You will bring her here?’

  ‘No, we’re having the betrothal at a private room in a restaurant.’